Monthly Archives: July 2004

Progress is coming along on the apartment. This is the longest amount of time I have ever had to spend on painting, but I have so many conflicting priorities that I just have to squeeze the paint into my schedule whenever I can. I still have both bedrooms and the kitchen left to do, but, my god, it’s almost all done… When I am completely done, I will put all the pix together in one post. The Living Room post is a few entries back…

On a more serious note: Please help the animals… I don’t care what you might think about different organizations designed to help the non-human animals suffering in this world, just help the animals, if you can.

Help Them

I got an update today from PETA2 alerting us to the atrocities being imposed on these amazing creatures at Columbia University in NYC. PETA and many other supporters of animal rights are such important pioneers in the movement toward ultimate peace. They may seem weird or overly-passionate, but that’s because they have to make up for a world of apathy among most human beings.

Here is a copy of the letter. Please pass it on:

A PETA investigation has revealed the grotesque abuse of animals in laboratories at Columbia University, including baboons who are subjected to invasive surgeries and left to suffer and die in their cages without painkillers. This horrific story came to our attention because a courageous whistleblower who was a veterinarian in Columbia’s laboratories stepped forward to tell us what she had witnessed. Thank goodness for good people!

Now, PETA is calling on Columbia to end three crude and cruel experiments, one of which involves artificially inducing strokes in baboons by cutting out their left eyeballs so that a critical blood vessel to their brains can be clamped. These experiments have no practical value. Animal records reveal that baboons have been left without veterinary care while they hunched over in their cages, unable to drink, chew, or even lift their heads. This is the sort of thing that you expect from a horror movie, not a prestigious university!

This abuse must stop! Please e-mail the president of Columbia University, Lee Bollinger, at bollinger@columbia.edu, asking him to put and end to all three experiments now.

To earn 500 Street Team points, BCC your e-mail message to StreetTeam@peta.org before noon on Tuesday, July 27. Be sure to use BCC so that Lee Bollinger can’t see that you’re also sending a copy to us. If you don’t know how to do that, just send us a second copy of your message. And as a thank you for helping animals, we want to send you a pack of our brand-spanking-new Columbia Cruelty stickers. We’ll e-mail you the link to the sticker order form after we receive a copy of your e-mail message.

What started off as a disorienting, sort of startling and disturbing display of half-naked glittery homos and a couple of Paris Hilton/Britney Spears knock-offs eventually turned into this really endearing, totally hilarious jaunt into the world of NYC created by the expectations of mid-westerner transplants. The play began as if it was taking itself seriously, and then suddenly you totally get it that it is not only making fun of the corny version of NYC that is portrayed by TV shows like Sex in the City, but they were making fun of the people who move here thinking that is really what it’s like! And even better was that the play makes fun of itself, sex, relationships,… I really loved it.

Once you started to “get it” what was going on, you started seeing that each character/actor was playing their parts perfectly. Josh was excellent as usual, but his role as the dead, fat, horny Elvis in a dream sequence with a fetish for thong panties was at once creepy and brilliant. Brianna Leigh Hansen played the naive yet snotty, secretly-from-Oklahoma girl trying to make it big in NYC, apparently by only using her ability to put on airs. She played it up EXCELLENTLY. So much so I wanted to smack her silly. And oh my god, particularly striking and achingly funny was Diedre Kilgore playing the multiple facets of a sexed up psychic dominatrix hiring a detective to look for her long lost love (read: one-night stand), whom she can only describe in terms of how he approached her at the bar one night to offer a drink and how he fucked her with his maybe-10-inch dick.

The whole play didn’t really seem to go anywhere, but for some reason when it was all over, you really liked all the corny, sexy characters a LOT!

We all wanted to go home after the play, but the cast convinced a few of us to go out for drinks for a bit, and even Cyprus went! And this was a Wednesday night! GO GRANNY!

PICS of part of the cast having food and drinks after:

PARTIAL CAST OF HOPSCOTCH

Special Note: Deandra, my good pal from my old position at Saks, has an accidental alter-ego we call DeNadra. Note in the background of my photo of some of the cast of Hopscotch and you will see DeNadra gettin’ all ghetto and goin’ through someone’s purse!

Reading time: < 1 minute
It is taking me forever to paint and clean and settle into our new home. I just thought I would send up a quick BEFORE/AFTER image of our Living Room.
We love happy colors!!
BEFORE & AFTER